Race & Modernism in Jean Toomer's Cane - Research Paper Example

Race & Modernism in Jean Toomers Cane Jean Toomer utilizes the concepts of alienation, cruelty, and racial slurs coupled with death and the in-depth description of murder as a means to evoke emotion, causing readers to question the societal norms and practices. Toomer’s Cane presents an uneducated black protagonist in love with a black woman, and ready to kill to protect her. The protagonist, Tom, stabs a white man who is also in love with the young girl, Louisa. In the end, Tom suffers a gruesome death at the hands of the white people. Although the story is centered around racial issues, the concept of death provokes emotions within the reader, and the graphic description of the death Tom suffers increases the degree to which emotions are induced within the readers. Toomer uses a racial slur to enhance the scene when a crowd member shouts “two deaths for a goddamn nigger.” The imagery of the death is magnified by the gruesome nature in which it occurs, as Tom “could be seen within the flames. Only his head, erect, lean, like a blackened stone. Stench of burning flesh soaked the air. Toms eyes popped.” Toomer’s graphic imagery evokes a reaction, repelling readers with the gory details of Tom’s murder. The text is embedded in American culture and history. Toomer’s story is set in the state of Georgia in an unnamed factory town. In “Blood-Burning Moon” this is not explicitly mentioned, though hinted at through the name of one of the characters, Old David Georgia. However, since this text is part of a larger collection, it should be known to the reader who has read the preceding texts. The connotations with Georgia – e.g. Southern, rural – may not be known to every reader in the target culture. However, this is not a real problem since they are made explicit in the text. The author mentions that factory town is in the South and from his description of the locale its rural character is revealed. In the translation, the story retains its American setting. The avant-garde movement, to which Toomer contributed by publishing in several of their magazines, appealed mainly to a relatively small group of intellectuals and artists. Although Cane received critical acclaim, only 500 copies were sold in the year of its publication. This work was intended for an intellectual audience who could understand and appreciate Toomer’s writing and continues to fascinate a mainly academic audience to this day. “Blood-Burning Moon may not be as nuanced and double-layered as the other texts in Cane, the target audience of the translation will very likely be the same, especially since the objective is to translate this text as if it were part of a complete translation of Cane. The source text was published almost a century ago, which means it is also somewhat removed from an American reader. This temporal difference is not noticeable in the language and does not result in any problems in translation. In the target text, modern Dutch has been used. Although the theme and cultural context of the source text do not present immediate difficulties, there are some elements that do. Toomer’s use of the word “nigger” and African American dialect will be discussed separately in the next sections. Throughout this and other stories in Cane, Jean Toomer often uses the word “nigger.” Although this word once was neutral, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it started to acquire negative connotations in the 18th century. Today, this word is usually avoided, especially by non-Africans. Interestingly, the word is used as a neutral or even favorable term by African Americans themselves, although they too use it in a derogatory manner (“Nigger”). Toomer was a mulatto, with both African and Western ancestry. In “Blood-Burning Moon” both white Americans and African Americans use the word and it is not always clear whether they use it in contempt or not. For example, Bob Stone is a white man, but he is in love with an African American girl, Louisa. On his way to Louisa, Toomer describes his thoughts as he is thinking about slavery and the possibility of revealing his love to Louisa. “His family had lost ground. Hell no, his family still owned the niggers, practically. . . . Was there something about niggers that you couldn’t know? . . Nigger was something more. . . . Something to be afraid of, more? Hell no. Who ever heard of being afraid of a nigger?” (Toomer 31-32). In these lines, the word may well be used in a derogatory and contemptuous way. However, a few lines later, when Bob turns his thoughts to Louisa, he might be using it in a less abusive way when he describes the object of his affection as a “beautiful nigger gal” (32). At the same time, he is in a debate with himself whether he should really use the n-word: “Why nigger? Why not, just gal? No, it was because she was nigger that he went to her” (32). It seems he is aware of the negative connotations of the word, but uses it deliberately because he loves her precisely because she is African American. When the word is used by other Negroes, it does not seem to be used in a positive manner either. One of the men sitting around the stove in the woods says of Tom Burwell, “Yassur, she is one bad nigger when he gets started” (32). A few lines down he says to one of the other men, “Shut up, nigger. Y dont know what y talkin bout” (32). From his speech, it is clear the speaker here is also a dark man, but he does not seem to be using the n-word quite as a neutral or even favorable term either. The introduction of the Blood-Burning Moon depicts a prolonged period of suffering; it overshadows a history of death and abuse, just like the story’s title. “Up from the skeleton stone walls, up from the rotting boards and the solid hand-hewn beams of oak of the pre-war cotton factory, dust came (30).” Slaves must have been laboring in the “pre-war cotton factory” while the owners of the factory, most likely White, made the “hand-hewn beams” for their subjects. The love triangle between Louisa and the two lovers disregards the still dominating “pre-war” laws and the reader can be almost certain about the outcome of the relationship. However, the perception of the situation among the three was significantly different. First, Louisa showed compassion and enjoyed the companionship of the two and believed that a relationship between either was possible. It indicated a significant change in the values of the society as every black girl should be afraid and submissive to the white, but she was quite at ease with herself. Tom professes his love to Louisa and is straightforward. Though he has a past with other women and a violent history with men, he wants a settled, married life with Louisa. Bob, however, is more complicated. His attraction to Louisa has no place in his current world. As he leaves his house to go meet Louisa in the cane break, Bob’s “mind became consciously a white man’s” (33). There is no meeting between the races in this story. Bob remembers his family’s plantation days and considers that his family has “lost ground” (33). He wishes he could take Louisa “as a master should” and begins to feel embarrassed that he must hide his feelings for Louisa. He believes Louisa is “lovely – in her way. Nigger way,” yet asks himself immediately, “What way was that?” as if he recognizes that beauty is beauty, even when it appears where you have been taught it cannot appear (33). Bob ultimately decides that Louisa is worth all the risk partly because she is black: “Beautiful nigger gal. Why nigger? Why not, just gal? No, it was because she was nigger that he went to her” (34). Bob’s conclusion could mean that Louisa’s blackness gives her the attraction of the forbidden; it could reference that hyper sexuality associated with black women; it could mean that there truly was something in Louisa’s personal and cultural manifestation of race that he needed. The line is ambiguous, but so are Bob’s motives. It is impossible for Bob, with his background in white plantation ownership and white privilege to see Louisa without also seeing her race and subordination, regardless of what he wants to see. Though his white privilege view of the world is failing him, Bob can conceptualize no other view to embrace. This white privilege perspective gets him killed. The predictable happens in this story. Bob finds out about Tom, catches him talking with Louisa, and fights him. Bob makes the mistake, however, of pulling a knife on Tom and Tom, the more experienced fighter, kills Bob without thinking. “White men like ants upon a forage rushed about” and Tom is lynched and burned (35). Though predictable, the ending is effective. Louisa can’t rewrite the narrative because she is not in charge of the narrative. Bob is in charge of the narrative, but he cannot rewrite it because his white privilege blinds him. He can’t see past the historical narrative of slave and owner. Tom can’t rewrite the narrative because he has no power to do so and because he has no reason to write a narrative that portrays whiteness as anything other than powerful and corrupt. “Blood- Burning Moon” shows that whiteness has not developed beyond its conception before the Civil War. “Blood-Burning Moon” shows the moderns’ problem with race: America’s conception of it does not translate into modernity. Though the Civil War brought the race to the attention of the nation and even those outside of the controversy over slave ownership began to see the necessity of defining nationhood along racial lines, the Civil War did not supplant old, slavery-laden views of race. Because of systemic racism, such as that Bob represents, there was little evidence in early twentieth-century America that the Enlightenment values of liberty, individual rights, and self-governance were to be applied to all (Ramsey 80). How does a democracy craft a new narrative of race when a hierarchy, removed legally, is still practically in place? Such is modernism’s question about race in America. Before the Civil War and Reconstruction, slave narratives showed the humanity of slaves and abolitionist tales advocated for the destruction of slavery. After the Civil War and Reconstruction, Southern apologists sought to rewrite the narrative of the slaveholding South, making it more palatable than it was and granting white Southerners an honored place in history. By the 1920s, burgeoning modernists were concerned with breaking with tradition and writing against history so that new constructions could be made. In “Blood-Burning Moon,” Toomer demonstrates the harmful legacy of slavery and the plantation system, but he does not yet offer a new script for racial performance. Later, after the perpetration of racial violence – when Bob Stone has been stabbed and Tom Burwell lynched, the sugarcane smell is replaced with the smell of death: “Stench of burning flesh soaked the air” (Toomer 48). So it seems that just as the cane, a product closely associated with slavery and racial hierarchies, pervades the Southern air and consciousness, so does the disturbing reminder that even in a post bellum, emancipated world, racial violence remains intimately connected with Southern culture. Notions of whiteness and blackness operate as another Gothic element in this text: they signify strictly defined boundaries, and the love triangle existing between Tom, Bob, and Louisa represents an attempt to navigate the transgression of those boundaries. Given the racially inflected social hierarchy of the Jim Crow South, the relationship that exists between Bob Stone and Louisa cannot be overtly recognized. Although it is an open secret among the town’s black community, Bob shudders at the thought of his Northern white friends discovering the affair: “Folks about town were all right, but how about his friends up North? He could see them incredible, repulsed. They didnt know. The thought first made him laugh. Then, with their eyes still upon him, he began to feel embarrassed” (Toomer 44). In thinking about his consensual relationship with Louisa, “his mind [becomes] consciously a white man’s,” and he actually reminisces about the days of slavery, when it was socially acceptable and almost expected for him to rape the black women his family owned: He passed the house with its huge open hearth which, in the days of slavery, was the plantation cookery. He saw Louisa bent over that hearth. He went in as a master should and took her. Direct, honest, bold. None of this sneaking that he had to go through now. The contrast was repulsive to him. His family had lost ground. Hell no, his family still owned the niggers, practically. Damned if they did, or he wouldnt have to duck around so. What would they think if they knew?”(Toomer 44) Similarly, the connection to Louisa that both men share makes for a complicated dynamic between Bob and Tom. Tom is Bob’s inferior according to the tacit rules of the town’s race-based social code, but it appears that Tom has the most serious relationship with Louisa, as he plans to propose her for marriage, something that Bob, despite his infatuation with Louisa, will never do as a white man. We see this distinction in both the territorial way that Tom discusses Louisa and the dismissive way that Bob does the same. Among the town men, Tom is quick to anger on the mention of Bob Stone: “Tom Burwell chewed cane stalk and laughed with the others till someone mentioned Louisa. Till someone said something about Louisa and Bob Stone, about the silk stockings she must have gotten from him. Blood ran up Tom’s neck hotter than the glow that flooded from the stove. He sprang up. Glared at the men and said, ‘She’s my gal’” (Toomer 41). Alternatively, Bob tempers his passion for Louisa with a distancing racism that simultaneously exoticizes and others her: “She was lovely – in her way. Nigger way. What way was that? Damned if he knew. … She was worth it. Beautiful nigger gal. Why nigger? Why not, just gal? No, it was because she was nigger that he went to her” (Toomer 44-45). Despite this marked difference in their views of Louisa, Tom is not able, under the racist rules governing the town, to confront Bob and rationally assert what he perceives as his rightful claim to Louisa. It is for this reason that the conflict comes to deadly blows, ultimately resulting in the murders of both men. Interestingly, despite being a Southern black woman, Louisa occupies the same kind of insider/outsider status as the mixed-race Northerner in this situation. Despite the story largely revolving around her and her affections, we do not get much insight into Louisa; but we are granted access to the fact that she apparently enjoys playing the two men off of each other for her own purposes: “His [Tom’s] black balanced, and pulled against, the white of Stone, when she thought of them. And her mind was vague upon them as she came over the crest of the hill, coming from the white folks’ kitchen” (Toomer 39-40). As the entity forcing Tom and Bob into relation, Louisa occupies the gray space between the white and black poles of factory town. The transgression of racial boundaries that she demands from each man is key to the Gothicism of “Blood-Burning Moon.” As Scruggs and VanDemarr point out, “Social barriers are also thresholds, and once crossed they open up spaces that are unknown, making the familiar suddenly strange, producing the ‘uncanny’” (139). By creating the liminal space of racial crossover, Louisa enables the cognitive dissonance shared by Bob and Tom as they attempt to navigate that liminal space, and their confusion at least partially accounts for the eruption of violence at the story’s close they don’t know how else to respond to something so unfamiliar and precarious, as they have no prior template for their situation. Each of Cane’s first six women has a fragmented identity that has been ruptured to some degree by a preconceived notion of her sexuality. Sexuality is almost always presented as a socially negotiated identity, and Toomer’s stories demonstrate that black women are not allowed much sexual autonomy. None of these women have stories that include the struggle for a mature and long-lasting relationship with a man; all seem to be stories of women who, like Karintha, were “a growing thing ripened too soon.” One of the modern lessons in Cane’s first six stories is that whiteness constructs the history of American identity; therefore, blackness cannot renegotiate history without the participation of whiteness. Race, or at least the power associated with race, determines which traditions can be defied, which can be rewritten, and which must be preserved. Mary Battenfeld has persuasively argued that Cane demonstrates the limits of the individual voice in promoting social change, a tenet of the Harlem Renaissance. Battenfeld contends that the African America voice has power only in the community, only in call-and-response. However, I believe the first six stories of Cane suggest Toomer will go further with that idea: language can only promote social change when it is shared between races. Cane will also show that unbiased, shared language between the races is, perhaps, impossible in America. Cane is important as a modernist text, and part of its connection to Lost Generation works is its modernism. Susan Blake claims Cane shows fragmented characters “struggling to impose form on a world of chaos” (516). Catherine Gunther Kodat argues that Toomer’s critics have historically read Cane as either a type of migration novel that makes a statement about black American identity or as a modernist novel that “interrogates – rather than celebrates – categories of racial identity and difference” (3). The latter reading leads to understanding Cane as a modernist text instead of an African American text. Kodat explores Cane as a “dialectical exploration of structures used to define and represent the self,” which allows her to integrate black identity formation with modernism (4). Cane’s exploration of self is, by necessity, connected to an exploration of racial identity. I argue that the exploration and identification of self-connects the three developing movements of modernism in the 1920s, and this connection between identity formation and modernism is hinged on race. Important in the connection between modernism and identity formation is the presentation of time. Toomer saw Cane as a swansong; he knew he was writing of an era nearly past. Yet John M. Reilly claims Cane is “informed by a desire for reclamation of the racial past” and therefore “asserts some of the major values of the Negro Renaissance” (312). Indeed, Barbara Foley’s work on Cane has exposed multiple references to actual historical and contemporary events which Toomer uses to create a shared past. Charles Scruggs claims a connection between Kenneth Burke and Toomer that led to Cane’s use of historical reality to challenge that historical tradition’s force: “If the past saturates space in the present (like Mikhail Bakhtin’s ‘chronotope’) with its presence, so too forces for change in the present challenge tradition’s totalizing nature” (Scruggs Burke 49). Toomer, as other burgeoning modernists of the 1920s, exposed the power of the past to shape the present in an effort to challenge the homogenizing effect of that past. Toomer included in the text of Cane drawn arcs, pieces of a circle. He explained that the arcs informed the reader that Cane was a cycle and readers could begin at any point in the cycle. Of course, these arcs also represent the play between past and present and between social and personal identity. Structurally, Cane still has an order; the arcs do not suggest that the stories and poems could be read in any order. Where one begins and ends in Cane is unimportant because each piece helps develop the same ideas and demonstrates the connectedness of ideas. But, if one shifts the order of the stories, there is no longer a cycle. Works Cited Battenfeld, Mary. “’Been Shapin Words T Fit M Soul’: Cane, Language, and Social Change. Callaloo 25:4 (2002): 1238 – 1249. Print. Blake, Susan L. “The Spectatorial Artist and the Structure of Cane,” CLA Journal (June 1974): 516-34. Print. Kodat, Catherine Gunther. “To ‘Flash White Light from Ebony’: The Problem of Modernism in Jean Toomer’s Cane. Twentieth Century Literature 46:1 (2000): 1 – 19. Print. Ramsey, William M. "Jean Toomers Eternal South." The Southern Literary Journal 36.1 (2003): 74-89. Web. Reilly, John M. “The Search for Black Redemption: Jean Toomer’s Cane.” Studies in the Novel 2 (Fall 1970): 312-24. Print. Scruggs, Charles, and Lee VanDemarr. "The Gothic Detective Story." Jean Toomer and the Terrors of American History. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania, 1998. 135-58. Print. Scruggs, Charles. “Jean Toomer and Kenneth Burke and the Persistence of the Past.” American Literary History 13:1(2001) : 41 – 66. Print. Toomer, Jean. Cane. (1923) Norton Critical Edition. New York, New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1988. Print. Read More